


Great

by psocoptera



Category: Popslash, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Career Angst, Early Work, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-11-16
Updated: 2003-11-16
Packaged: 2018-02-10 10:37:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2021937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remember those rumors about an NSYNC cameo in Attack of the Clones?  In this story, they're all Jedi, only JC is more interested in plants than fighting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Great

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cecilia (ceciliaregent)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ceciliaregent/gifts).



> Ceciliaregent was one of the three people who dragged me into NSYNC fandom, so when I started writing popslash, I dedicated a story to each of them. Thanks again, it was awesome!

When JC was a padawan he had dreamed of being a statue. 

Not bodily - he felt far too happy in motion for that. But to see his head added to the row of busts of distinguished Jedi in the Archives - what could be better than that? 

He had accompanied his Master on routine diplomatic missions and wished for emergencies, outbreaks of violence, imminent war, opportunities for heroics. 

When he was sixteen he had seen an outbreak of violence and decided he would rather be remembered for his poetry, or perhaps a great - peaceful - discovery. 

Now, Knighted and assignmentless, he wondered if a statue might have been more reasonable. 

They were doing great things with carbon-freezing these days. 

*** 

"He who laughs, lasts," said Chris. 

"All the same," said Joey, rubbing his ass, "It was not a very compassionate response to a brother Jedi's unfortunate mishap." 

Even JC raised an eyebrow at that. 

" _Maybe_ ," Joey said, " _Maybe_ the careening off the far wall was a little funny. _Possibly_ landing on the shoe pile was a bit funny. But slightly overdoing a Force-boost... that could happen to anybody." 

" _Slightly_?" asked Justin. "Imagine if you'd hit a little harder," he went on helpfully, "You could be in the Archives for 'First Jedi to die of impaling himself on a boot-buckle.'" 

"Multiple boot-buckles," said Joey, "I feel like I sat on a Dandaanian hedgehog. How could they have _all_ managed to have the tongues up?" 

Everyone felt, in the Force, the ripple of Lance trying to Look Innocent. 

"You never," said Justin, "I didn't feel it at _all_." 

Lance looked smug. 

"But," asked Joey, a little annoyed, "Can you startle another Master when he notices your feet aren't touching the ground as you walk beside him? _That's_ subtlety, it's what they said about Master Galhu -" 

"- in the Archives," they all chimed in. 

They all thought about it, making their mark, doing something that would outlast them. The average lifespan for a Jedi was two-thirds the longevity of their species. 

It would have been closer to half, but Yoda was seriously throwing the curve. 

"I think I set some kind of record for least important courier run," JC said. "Brought the Rastin outpost their mail: two continued-assignment notices, four back issues of Playsapient, and a couple of credit card offers. Every time I go in the Archives I feel like those busts are smirking at me." 

"He who lasts, laughs," Chris said. 

*** 

Chris caught him by the arm as they left the practice-ground. 

"You know, smiling hasn't been forbidden for Jedi since the D'N'Shi'Grien Edict," he said, demonstrating this with a giant forced grin. "Mace just had a facial nerve go dead from a mis-set bactry mask." 

"I really doubt _Master Windu's_ facial disposition is traceable to any tank accident you'd be aware of," JC said reprovingly. 

Chris winced. "That bad, huh," he said. His eyes went a little unfocused for a moment. "Upset about your droid name again?" 

JC smiled a little. "That was _years_ ago," he said, shaking his head. 

"Well?" Chris said expectantly. 

JC sighed. "Just..." 

Chris frowned when JC didn't go on. "What, is he - ?" 

"No," JC said, exasperated into speaking, "'Just' like 'only', like mail runs. I might as well be AgriCorp." 

"Nah," Chris said, "You look too good in tunic layers. AgriCorp is all... waders and shit." 

JC giggled and let Chris drag him off to dinner. 

*** 

Routine mail runs were a droid job; they only sent Jedi to Rastin to give the outposters the occasional visitor. Real courier work meant transporting valuable objects like tissue samples and art masterpieces, things that couldn't just be encrypted and squirted off by transmitter. 

JC never got real courier assignments. The reason things were valuable was that people wanted them; a courier had to be able to handle the situation if someone decided to resort to aggressive methods of acquisition. Justin and Lance got courier missions all the time. But Justin fought with an easy grace and an impossibly long reach, Lance with a calm, uncanny precision. 

JC, on the other hand, had never _actually_ severed anything while duelling, but there had been a couple of close calls with the tip of a Twi'lek tentacle and his own foot. And he had a tendency to deflect stun and blaster bolts into things like windows and innocent bystanders. Everyone had kept clear of the first three rows of the stands at his trials, much to his irritation - as if he would have been taking them if he was still zapping spectators. As it was he had knocked a ricochet into the water pitcher by the judges' table, heating it enough to send up a large cloud of steam that was almost, JC thought, as hot as his ears had been. 

JC had once tried to explain that fighting just made him nervous, that being shot at, or worse, confronted in a duel, made him feel tense and unpleasant and he just lost his focus. 

"We're a _martial order_ ," Lance had said. 

"What happened to 'war does not make one great', hm?" Joey had asked. 

"If that's so how come half the Archive is battle records?" Justin had argued, and they were off. 

Chris had caught JC's eye under the vigorous debate and quietly agreed that fighting didn't seem to be JC's forte, because look at what he could do with the vines? 

It was true, of all the saber arts he was most comfortable with the vines. He had passed his trials on the basis of that performance. He remembered - the rapacious dja entangled with an Anarrean creeper, both writhing sinuously; igniting his lightsaber and slicing in and out like a dance. Lopping off a branch of dja, spotting the rooting body that had just been severed from the main stalk and _feeling_ a hundred more growths about to burst out, flowing without thinking into a backhanded cut that had halved it. Pruning away the last of the dja and realizing that there was not a cut or a mark on the perfectly intact creeper. 

Yeah, he was good at the vines. But the vines weren't getting him an assignment. The Council may have preached the importance of all the arts, but in practice they were interested in five: two combative, duelling and the gantlet, two diplomatic, the Lucky Ear and the Wise Tongue, and one general, the art of adaptability. 

JC knew that combat wasn't his strength, so it didn't surprise him that he never got real courier assignments. To be totally accurate, he never actually put his name up for real courier assignments, figuring he could save someone the trouble of skipping past it. He _had_ tried applying for diplomatic missions, but he never got those either. He suspected it was because he had a tendency to pay attention to what the Force was telling him instead of what people were saying out loud. He thought this gave him a more unclouded understanding of the situation, but it generally annoyed the hell out of planetary officials who expected to be listened to. 

He spent a lot of time browsing in the Archives. 

*** 

"Are you moping?" Chris asked. 

Lance and Justin were out jumping around the galaxy, and Joey had been off on some planet for weeks in negotiations. JC tried to find things to do - he sometimes gave tours to visiting dignitaries, and he had repainted his quarters, and he practiced a lot - but Chris had a knack for catching him... not moping, negative emotions led to the Dark Side... _loitering wistfully_. He shook his head. 

"Moooo-ping!" Chris accused, jumping around and pointing at him. "Mope mope mope, moper!" 

"Something I can do for you?" JC asked. 

"Come to the courts tonight! Rendom Silabul's fighting a public with Adi..." 

JC sighed. The prospect of watching a public challenge between Masters was not what he needed right now. What he needed was - 

"Joey!" Chris said. JC started listening again, confused. "He's on his way back from Pa-what-sko," Chris said. "I guess the negotiations must have gone better than he thought they would." 

JC grinned. Maybe he was stuck sitting at the Temple while his friends went out, but at least they came back, and Joey was guaranteed to have tales to tell. 

"That's better," Chris said. "It's no good worrying. It's like the proverb says... worry leads to angst. Angst leads to art. Art," he paused dramatically, "Leads to scaffolding." 

JC frowned. "It was a very small mural," he said. 

"Some people have no appreciation for my brilliance," Chris sighed. "C'mon." 

*** 

They watched the challenge until Joey found them in the stands. At least JC watched... he had the sneaking suspicion that Chris kept looking over at him, although with all the Jedi training in peripheral awareness, there wasn't actually any eye movement he could point to as proof. 

It just _felt_ like it, somehow. 

"Paleensko was anticlimactic," Joey told them over drinks, after they had watched the two masters duel their way to a flashy stalemate. "The whole situation turned out to be a blow-up over a comment the crown prince had made about the ambassador's wife. Ugh, sometimes I wish celibacy would catch on in the rest of the galaxy." 

Chris made a strange face. 

"No, I know," Joey said. " _Somebody's_ got to make more Jedi, right? But it would solve a lot of problems." 

"Maybe more people should give up conflict," JC said. "Because, really, what's at the root of conflict, but conflict, and." 

Joey smiled. "Without conflict, how could we oppose what's wrong?" 

"But... opposition supposes a... there are no... war does not -" 

"I'm all about the talking," Joey cut him off swiftly. "But mediation isn't for every situation, you know? If the choice is years of strife or a fast battle, well... a guardian of peace is a practitioner of war, right? Didn't your year get that the first day of strat&tat?" 

"You padawans," Chris said, jumping into the conversation. "In my day strategy and tactics were separate classes, I'll have you know." 

He put on a wise face, asking to be laughed at. 

"I guess they hadn't admitted the shortage of teaching masters yet," Joey just said, and Chris's face fell flat as they were all quiet for a moment. 

"Too many lost in battle," JC said sourly, pushing away from the table. He nodded a quick farewell and headed for his rooms, feeling their eyes on his back, figuring that as soon as he left Chris would be telling Joey he was out of sorts over his lack of an assignment. 

And it wasn't that, not entirely... it was sitting in the stands feeling the eagerness with which his brother Knights had watched the duel. It was that even Joey the diplomat could ask if something had been missing from his training. It was that he wanted his saber work to be elegant, but shied away from the thought of 'deadly'. And, okay, it was that even with a shortage of trained Knights, there didn't seem to be any posting that he could fill. 

_What kind of Jedi am I?_ he asked himself, settling down into uneasy meditation. 

*** 

Chris found him in the vine garden transplanting dja cuttings. 

"Nurturing your enemies?" he said, settling down on his heels in the dirt besides JC. 

JC frowned at him. 

"It's polite," he said mildly. "I just took one to pieces - nasty variant, translates to, uh, crimson scourge. Whipped its tendrils around." He made a little demonstrative gesture. 

"I love the way you find duelling unpleasant but are perfectly happy getting attacked by three inch _thorns_ ," Chris said, making a face. 

JC shuddered a little. "Well, see, no. Leathers, because, not happy, but..." he paused. "It's not attacked exactly," he said. "It doesn't mean anything, it just wants to grab on and root, you know?" 

Chris rolled his eyes. "I'm trying out Esther's new bot," he said. "Want to come hold the kill-switch?" 

"Isn't _she_?" JC asked, nonetheless standing up and brushing dirt off his knees. "And since when do you bot-test?" 

"Since Esther asked," Chris said. "She probably figured if she couldn't get Master Yoda -" 

"That you were the next shortest?" JC said, ducking away from Chris's tickle attack. 

*** 

Chris did fight like Yoda, JC thought, watching him spin crazily with his lightsaber. Possibly a bit less... effectively... but he did do some of the same hopping around, and he had a touch of the same breathless speed... 

At least JC found himself feeling a bit breathless. 

And he had found himself having most inappropriate thoughts when Chris had ignited his lightsaber. 

_Maybe I am battle-eager_ , he thought. _I could go out for courier tomorrow. Rrrrgh_ , he thought experimentally. _No, wait, grrrr. Grrrr._

He sighed and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Saber work often got him a bit... excited... but not in a way he could use in combat. Not that it was a distraction; he had, after all, spent his entire adolescence training, and one of his Master's few helpful pieces of advice had been that physical activity just had that effect on some people and it was nothing to worry about. So he was long since used to ignoring it. 

Chris somersaulted over the bot, twisting as he dropped to land facing it, grinning. You could even call it smirking. 

What was really making JC uncomfortable was that it was usually his own lightsaber that did it, like there was some sort of parallel connection, extend the one and the other would follow. Watching someone else's blade leap to life... being a Jedi, spending any time in the practice grounds, meant people were constantly pulling out white-hot lengths and walking around with them erect. It made for lots of bad jokes for the eight-year-olds and was utterly commonplace thereafter. Seeing that familiar elongation in Chris's hands shouldn't have made any difference. 

But, oddly, it seemed that it did. 

*** 

Justin and Lance got back from their latest mission and insisted on teaching everybody a game they had picked up involving counters and dice, that they had played for safe passage through a contested zone and won, so they spent a string of evenings on that until Chris got bored and pointed out that you had to be pretty stupid border guards to play a dice game with Jedi. Joey left for more negotiations and came back with long stories of a pun-laden legal code that he swore were true, and Justin and Lance took a bunch of short assignments on Coruscant in the lower levels, and JC still floated around the Temple feeling useless. Chris kept coming and finding him and dragging him to lectures, and general briefings, and trials, until JC saw a couple of the new Knights get snatched up for assignments and refused to attend any more of the latter. 

He started to have nightmares of ending up as JC, Jedi Paralegal, or worse, being made responsible for the Kenobi/Skywalker commandeered vehicle account. 

*** 

One morning found him idly levitating spoons and knives in the canteen breakfast nook (a handily out of the way table), trying to see if he could coordinate them into a dancing humanoid figure, and wondering whether Justin and Lance might take him along on their next foray into the floor strata, if they happened to get an emergency... gardening assignment. JC was quite sure there was plant life in the lower levels that would prove a challenge for even the Jedi, but it wasn't the kind of matter of galactic importance thing they usually got called in for. Maybe if an audraetoo got out of control and ate an ambassador or something... the spoon man had absent-mindedly become a Jedi with a toothpick lightsaber and was bouncing and whirling to fend off an attack from the napkin-holder when Chris came rushing up. 

"Wow," he said, pulling up short at the table, "Is that me? You've got my reverse takabishi defense down exactly, man, there's that damn hesitation on the parry, I can never get rid of that..." 

JC started and the spoons and knives clattered down onto the table. "Um," he said. "What?" 

"And you don't even fight that style," Chris went on. "Can you do Justin next? Do Justin!" 

"Uh," JC said. "I... uh..." 

"Class prize in elocution," Chris said. "There you have it, ladies and gentlebeings. This outstanding member of the Jedi corps - " 

"Oh, _shut_ it," JC said, pushing himself to his feet. "Did you want something?" 

"Jayce," Chris said, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean..." he looked down at the fistful of data flimsies in his hand. "No, he said, "I'll just... JC. I really do. Think. So. And I would know, or at least I should, and -" 

"Class prize in rhetoric?" JC asked wryly. 

"Point," Chris said. "But my rhetoric works best when my audience already knows at some level what they want, and just needs help bringing it out into words." 

JC felt a vague uneasy frisson at the thought of Chris seeing into what he wanted and bringing it out into words. 

"Maybe," Chris was still saying, quietly, "You should figure out where your elocution works best." He turned on his heel and left, Jedi-silent. 

"That's what I've been trying to do," JC whispered. 

*** 

But had he? Looking closely and dispassionately at the available evidence, when he wasn't with Joey and Justin and Lance, and Chris, he spent half his time reading news bulletins and half puttering around in the greenhouses and practically none seeking out potential postings. 

In order to consider this, he had, in fact, retired to Greenhouse Nine, and was occupied in staking the new shoots of a semiaquatic tuber. It was going to leave some AgriCorp trainee with an afternoon to fill, but it helped him think. The greenhouse was peaceful place, all light and fresh water, and he could feel the Force in the new growth, and he soaked up the serenity like the plants soaked up the sun. 

He didn't, JC thought, know what to do. He didn't know what he _could_ do. He needed an assignment, it was his duty as a Jedi and his natural behavior, as much as floating around was for the tuber. Trying to live out of the water was shriveling him up. But where to find water? He didn't know. He'd been taking that as an answer, though, a stopping point, rather than letting it be a question. 

Making it a question, however, he still had no idea what the answer might be. 

He finished with the tubers and moved on to a tray of cloud-pine seedlings, checking carefully for beetles or mites or rogue nanodroids. As much as he felt at peace in the greenhouse, though, there wasn't a niche for him here. Looking at the seedlings, he could see in his mind's eye the strong saplings they'd grow to be, the potential wrapped snugly in each little twig. And all it had to do was unfurl, it didn't need his guidance or his presence, his attention was just a small and unnecessary kindness. 

_Somewhere,_ he thought, _somewhere the Force needs my help to realize itself. There's some planet where peace needs defending, where knowledge needs protecting, where the Republic could use me for something other than mail runs. There must be, there are a lot of planets..._

And then working his way down the row, he came to a trellis of calabar. 

The long pods hung heavy from the vines, and JC was awash in memory. Being a young padawan, sneaking down to the greenhouse with Chris and Joey, experimenting with calabar. The Eseran ordeal bean, very poisonous unless you'd mastered the Jedi techniques to alter metabolism, and mind-enhancing if you had. The trick, JC recalled, was to concentrate the physostigmine across the blood-brain barrier while sequestering the other toxins... He remembered Chris, pupils contracted to points, reciting back passage after passage from Lives of the Masters, word for word, his voice somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. 

And it was like thinking about it had revived all the symptoms - his arms and legs felt weak and shaky, he could feel his heart pumping hard, his bowel quivered. 

He could remember the visual effects, the way everything looked sharper, like outlines drawn around everything important. 

He could see an outline drawn around Chris. 

He hadn't even touched the plants, it had been years since he had cracked open a pod and chewed the bitter-tasting beans inside, but he felt the sudden clearing of perception, the bright salience of newly-acquired information. 

JC sat down hard on the greenhouse floor. 

He had never had to deal with this, this overwhelming... awareness. His friendship with Lance and Justin and Joey and Chris had kept him, all of them, out of the standard adolescent throes - when everyone else had been infatuated with their masters (even Ker-Eth Miall, whose master was a giant _mollusk_ , for godsakes, but she's just whisper "radula"), they weren't: they'd had each other. Very pleasant at the time, to focus on drilling, on cementing his knowledge of the forms, on the insights into his classwork that came from tutoring a struggling Justin and Lance, but now he felt the lack of practice at dealing with this... thing. 

"There is no emotion," JC reminded himself. "There is peace. There is no passion, there is serenity." 

But the light filtering down through the leaves looked suddenly murky, and he hadn't figured anything out at all. 

*** 

Remembering the strength of that steady companionship, he waited until Justin and Lance were back and invited them all to dinner in his quarters. JC worked in the small kitchen chopping fresh vegetables, leafy greens and spicy roots and pungent berries, wondering if they'd sense his agitation in the Force or just in the jagged cuts of the roots. 

Joey showed up, and Justin and Lance, towing a small, partly-disassembled droid they were pretty sure, they said, had a chip with the de-encrypted passcodes of half the Coruscant high houses stuck somewhere in its innards. Chris did not show up. 

Joey entertained them with salacious details from a union dispute that turned out to involve a demand for more options in the company-provided sex benefits. Chris still didn't show up. Lance and Justin attempted to demonstrate the morundai catch-pass in JC's sitting-room and came inches from smashing a lighting fixture, and JC made tea, and some bad impromptu haiku was composed on the subjects of tea, droid circuitry, and guests who nearly smashed your lamps, and eventually everyone excused themselves due to lateness and early-morning commitments, which JC, of course, didn't share. 

Chris finally showed up, breathless and offering apologies, explaining that a work-session had run way over. 

In his newfound clarity regarding Chris, JC realized several things that he had been resisting seeing: that his hair grew in endearing patches going different directions, that his wrists were slim without being bony, that he had no idea what Chris's assignment was. 

There was a strained pause. 

"Um," JC said, "You don't, you know, I don't really, I guess we don't talk about - what do you do?" 

Chris laughed. "JC," he said, "You are allowed to pay attention to things _besides_ the Force, you know." 

JC smiled back, trying not to wince. "So...?" 

"I work in the Archives," Chris said. "Why'd you think I was always around?" 

"I thought you were in Senate liaison or something," JC said lamely. 

"Nah," Chris said, "I'm a reference archivist. People come in with questions, I figure out what they actually want, tell them why, and find it for them." 

"But you always hated desk work," JC said, still feeling confused. "You work in _reference_?" 

"They let me run around the stacks," Chris said cheerfully, "See, I pretty much figured working there was the only way I was ever going to get into the Archives. Always wanted to, you know." 

"I know," JC said, "Um. Berries?" If he had some left. This had not been the plan, the plan had involved Joey and Justin and Lance all being there, not Chris with late-night wide eyes crowded into his too-small kitchen. 

Chris looked at him. "I think," he said, "It really _is_ late; you can meet me at the canteen for lunch, okay?" 

JC nodded, trying to clear his mind of incipient haiku. 

*** 

Tranquillity eluded him. He tried to sleep, he tried to read a treatise on pedagogic epistemology he'd picked up in the Archives, he knelt on the floor meditating for hours on the First Koan (The Force is not perfect. Nothing is perfect except the Force.). 

He eventually gave up - it was the next morning by then - and went out for a walk in the gardens. 

The Temple grounds were unusually empty; JC thought he remembered something about a big seminar on midichlorion genetics, that was supposed to propose a new theory for the decline in births of Force-sensitive infants or something. It meant that the gardens were peaceful, outside of his own aura of discomposure - and made it all the more startling when the peace was pierced by a sudden stab of panic. 

JC flowed into the Force like he'd never been in discord, running fleetly over rocks and through bushes towards the source of the fear. 

Coming over a low rise he saw a frozen group of small trainees, and two of them still slowly falling off a low wall (how fast had he been running?) into a seething mass of dja. 

Time snapped back into normal speed and without thinking he was there. Lightsaber out, sweep, reverse, flick on flick off, cut the vine but miss the child. Here, here, not there, slide back in between, if the dja is like a hundred clutching hands then you have to be a thousand darting blades, a white-burning wall. There's a rooting body cut, quarter it, move while the vines move while the children move, flinching in panic you can feel louder than the dja, and there. There. 

JC realized he was standing ankle-deep in charred vine, here and there a bleeding cut on his bare ankles, through his thin shirt, looking at two unharmed, untouched children. He blinked, and the pile of vines smoldered quietly, and both children - all six of the children - started crying. 

"Hey," he said gently, extinguishing and sheathing his lightsaber, "Hey." 

He took the two hands nearest him and led them out of the mess of vine, climbing over the encircling wall to clear ground, shaking cinders from his sandals. 

Sitting down, he sent a wave of reassurance through the Force, enough that two of the bystanders stopped crying and blinked at him uncertainly. And patting the ground beside him, he started to talk, quietly, about danger-sense and mindfulness and plant identification, shaping his voice carefully around each word to turn it from trauma into just another lesson. 

A rather harried-looking young Teaching Master found them sitting there, six pairs of bright eyes looking up at JC, trying to guess what sort of native predators the dja might be defending itself from with those thorns. 

She looked at the pile of dja, mostly charcoal, and raised her eyebrows, and JC smiled back, a little wry, a lot benign. 

"You'd better go with the Master now," he told the trainees, and they obediently got up to follow her away. 

One of them, one of the two who had fallen, ran back. 

"I'm Binli Ing," he said, bobbing in a little formal bow. "Sir, when are we going to have your class? What do you teach?" 

JC sucked in his breath. Binli Ing was a very small person with sticky-pad fingers and compound eyes. JC could see a tiny image of himself reflecting in each lens. 

"I'm JC," he said, bowing back from where he sat. "I don't... I don't teach." 

The small face fell and membranes slid down over the faceted eyes. 

"Oh," said a small voice, and the trainee sped off to rejoin his classmates. 

And JC sat very still. He thought the dja might feel like this, reaching out, ready to plunge in somewhere rich and right, then falling short, cut back, chopped off. Or a tuber, asked to pick up and walk out of the water. 

Chris coughed unmistakably behind him. "Kid's right, you know. You really should teach." 

JC wanted to explode. "Serenity," he hissed to himself through clenched teeth. "Chris - you _know_ I can't." 

"Prior commitment?" Chris asked, walking around to kneel down in front of JC. "Wow, I felt something go down, must have really been something," he said absently, starting to dab at one of the long scratches on JC's arms. 

JC snatched it back. "Chris," he said, "Chris, you know I don't have a prior commitment. You know I don't have _anything_ to do. And you know that only the very best ever serve as Teaching Masters." 

"And?" Chris said blandly, making a catch for the ankle with the big gash, which JC promptly pulled back. 

"So I'm _not_ ," JC said, trying to reach for calm, trying not to sound like a whiny padawan. "They're _top fighters_ , high-ranked in both the duel and the gantlet... I can barely _clear_ the gantlet. I don't think I even have the potential to reach that level." 

"So you've said it yourself," Chris said, "That the Jedi put too much emphasis on war. You're obviously meant to teach, hell, they _need_ teachers, there are a _lot_ of arts besides the gantlet, you don't need to be able to dodge blaster bolts to teach meditation, or about how to work with the Living Force. If the Council thinks so, then they're wrong." 

"Wrong," JC said, "Wrong." He realized that in pulling back from Chris's first aid he had curled himself into a ball, and felt vaguely ridiculous. He lowered his knees and straightened up. "Over a thousand generations handing down ancient wisdom, adding to our knowledge and perfecting the teachings of an Order that predates the founding of the Republic, and you're saying they're wrong. Give me one example, _one example_ , of something they've been wrong about!" 

"This," Chris said. "The Jedi are wrong about this." 

He leaned forward and kissed JC. 

JC thought it would be white-hot like a saber blade, but he was light and fresh water. 

Chris rocked back on his heels. 

"Are you distracted?" Chris asked. "Are you alienated from the Force?" 

"Yes," JC said. 

Chris slashed the air with his hand, a short sharp motion. "Fuck," he said. "Fuck. I'm sorry -" 

"No," JC said. "I'm. Not from the Force. Distracted. Yes. Um." 

He kissed Chris again. 

"I'm distracted from distraction," JC said. "It's like calabar, the edges around things. The Force... everything stands out." 

Chris raised an eyebrow, then unfocused his eyes for a moment. "Okay," he said, starting to smile, "That's your example." 

"But -" JC started to say. 

"Besides," Chris cut him off, "Drawing teachers from the fighter pool is a recent development anyways, I can name 'em a hundred cases of renowned Teaching Masters who depended on a Knight escort for protection." 

"But," JC said, eyebrows drawing in, "If you could back it up from the Archives then why did you -" 

Chris leaned forward and kissed him again. 

"Oh," JC said, "Right." 

He leaned forward into Chris, who had given up dabbing at scratches and was stroking JC's back with a slightly unbelieving smile. 

"All _sorts_ of interesting things in the Archives, it turns out," he murmured into JC's ear, adding a swipe of his tongue. 

JC jerked. "My _ear_ ," he said, aware from his Jedi cultural erudition that he sounded stupidly virginal, and also aware that this was probably to be expected when you had grown up in a celibate order, and that Chris was perfectly well aware of that and ooh, the ear. Definitely concentrating on the ear now. 

"Lucky ear," Chris whispered, "Wise tongue, you see?" 

And then JC had to twist around and bop Chris over the head and Chris had to tickle him and there was a certain amount of rolling around and there was going to be a question later of how did you get bits of burnt dja out of tunics, but it was like the Force, once you knew it was there you couldn't help but want to be in harmony with it. Possibly it was the Force; JC had never felt more alive. 

Chris broke away from their kiss long enough for JC to open his eyes. 

"I'm gonna grab on and root, you know," he said breathlessly. "You go for that, right?" 

JC just laughed. 

**Author's Note:**

> I think dja vine is from Robin McKinley's _Spindle's End_. There are probably other similar references that I no longer remember I should acknowledge, sorry!


End file.
